Saturday, 23 September 2017

The long version: The three VM36es on the XS Triple sidecar are WAY easier on the throttle than the twin VM38s. So I gave the local Mikuni a call and asked for softer springs and here they are: VM34/55 springs (from a VM34) are only a 1.3mm instead of 1.6mm wire-gauge and thus are notably softer. Do you feel the difference? Absolutely.

What's in store for the Tractor over the Winter I hear you ask? Well thanks for asking, I'll build (more re-house) the engine in a new set of cases plus a new set of cylinders and pistons. I still haven't gotten around checking up those XV700 heads, but I'd love to use those instead of the old 750ies and some minor suspension work and a bit of cosmetics, mainly a new tail-light (thinking about going down the route of a Lucas-style tail-light) and repainting the fuel tank as good TR1 fuel tanks are a bit hard to find. If I happen to have a lot of time on my hands, I may end up copying the old Faust-mid-controls for long-range touring.

Sunday, 17 September 2017

Well, I'll start with a bit of disappointment for you straight away: There are no pics on how to install the Hitachi carbs, because it is pretty straight forward. Only thing to remember: All the rubbers on the airbox are at least 35 years old and are pretty stiff. A bit of the classic heatgun/hairdryer and lube treatment will help you there. Except from that, the job might be easier if you undo the battery box and slide it back, but it's doable with it in place as well.

That being said, huge thanks to my dad for doing all the polishing on the exhaust and mudguards, because as you might have noticed with my own bikes: I ain't one much for polishing unless engine internals are involved.

And yes, this bike is for sale, as hinted by the youtube-clip AND the label underneath. If you fancy it, it has got full German paper work, no TÜV, but as you can confirm with the various blog posts, all consumables are new, so new TÜV should be absolutely no problem. Pretty much the same goes for registering it in Austria as it is also completely set up for that as well. Drop me an email (see address on the right) or a comment, if you want to buy it and I'll get back to you.

Wednesday, 13 September 2017

As usual once you have a bike on the road, the actual work starts. All the little or not so little things come up. One of which was that the starter drew massive amps, when starting and still didn't spin over the engine quite very fast or powerful.

So as I had to re-jet the carbs anyway after removing all those extra baffles in the exhaust, the way was clear to get to that starter.

Getting the starter out is really just a matter of undoing the two bolts holding it down in the back and then pulling it to the right and wiggling it upwards ever so gently, without breaking the cases. But it's pretty clear to see, the bike this engine came out of, was parked outside for ages. So a bit of extra cleanup (and paint) was due.

With the starter clamped into the vice, it was time to undo the two long bolts holding the complete assembly together. Stock starters usually sport philipps-head, whereas aftermarket ones generally have hex-head-bolts holding them together (which makes disassembly a lot easier).

The first find was a completely dry set of planetary gears.

And already the first sighting of a lot of carbon dust, which had found its way past the shaft (no grease of any sorts as well) and into the gear housing.

And wow: Never seen that much carbon dust in a starter and it still working.

The picture doesn't do it even remotely justice on just how much dust had come out when cleaning.

With all parts cleaned and greased (incl. the terminal for corrosion prevention), assembly was a matter of minutes.

It admittedly doesn't sound much different, but now the bike can be
started more than three times in a row without the battery breaking
down, which I do consider a vast improvement.

Saturday, 9 September 2017

... to make the old girl all illegal again. I mean we all know how this goes: We do quite a bunch of mods to pass inspection and then we revert them, to make the bike rideable again.

Step one: Make the engine breath again. So the inserts for actually running the bike are "just" two washers with 20mm holes in them. It's only moderately louder at idle (around the 81db mark that is in the papers), but admittedly from 4000rpm onwards it does get noisier.

Now with TIG HF-pulsing it is possible to create welds with very little burn in, which in this case means, that once I ground the weld flat, there's not much left to hold it in there. The heat affected zone of the weld (aka. bluing) was only 3mm deep, just to give you an idea. Now on a structural weld this would have been terrible, but in this case we have a weld which looks solid, can be ground back quickly and then gives access to the damper insert.

Additionally the welds look very, very pretty, if I may say so. (That's around 15 amps at 200Hz with 80% on time.)

Now the steering damper is definitely quite useful, but I have to do a lot of reversing, when I park my bike in front of my house and it limits the steering angle substantially. So off it went.

And lastly, as I didn't have the right bolt, that reflector on the rear had to go as well, but is stored in the special-for-registration-only-doodads-box.

With a few kilometres under it's wheels it became quite apparent, that the jetting had left some room for improvement at the very least.

Another thing that became quite apparent was electrical consumption. Now the bike would charge fine, but with headlight, position lights and the various gauges, I had to rev her up to 3000 rpm to make her charge. With some proper LED bulbs this was changed to charging at 13.8V at idle, which meant even riding around town, where you're not running that high rpm would get the battery charged sufficiently.

Unfortunately the whole story doesn't end on a high note. The part with the highest electrical consumption was quite in need of a cleanup and left me draining the battery, resulting in a very healthy push of around 2.5 km to the shop, but that's a story for the next time...

Thursday, 7 September 2017

... or in other words a little writeup on how everything went up to the registration.

First things first: I had a call from my engineer that we had a little mixup with the numbers on the noise levels and as such my bike was too loud. So I sort of knew, that I had to do something about it. Luckily my muffler-insert-design already planned for such events, which meant the inserts are stackable and although the devil's in the details, i.e. how do you have this whole thing end up somewhat straight, it was a mere hour of fabricating to end up with a two-stage version. (The one originally in the TR1's exhaust ended up bent, when I took it out, so I couldn't simply cut that up as I had planned.)

Ground the old weld off and the tip can be driven out with (relative) ease. A quick measurement returned between 77 and 77.3 db of noise, which was way below the 81db mandated. And it sounded like a squirrel with diarrhea.

To please the eye of the official I quickly polished the mufflers and have to admit they came out rather decent.

The next problem was one of those tasks, that I had on my list, but forgot about: The rear brake lever on XS-Triples only makes very little way (maybe 15 to 20 degrees) as they have a rather beefy master cylinder. As such the lever mount in the frame tends to seize up, with the brake lever not coming back up anymore. Unfortunately, as I found out, if I want to fit a grease nipple, I have to take the sidecar off, as I can't get to it properly. (Luckily I had exactly the same issue on my first XS, but it took me bl**dy ages to find.) Pushing it back a bit and soaking it in WD40 cured it for now, but it's definitely one of the higher priority mods that needs to be addressed.

One of the other challenges I had to face: As I didn't register the bike in my name BEFORE I started the conversion, I couldn't simply drive it to the department of motor vehicles, but had to borrow a trailer.

Already loaded up on the trailer, I realized that I had forgotten to install a reflector and this is exactly the kind of sh*te that might have gotten me into re-visiting them...

But I didn't and this is probably one of the most expensive eight page books I have ever bought.

Coming up next: removing all sorts of things from the sidecar that have only been fitted for registration and running into the first problems during the first few kilometres!

Saturday, 2 September 2017

Do you remember those instances, when you tried to sneak out of handing in your homework in school by blaming it on your pet? Well I only ever had guinea pigs and cats and both didn't bother much with my books.Well, the same has happened to this post, as I somehow must have copied the contents of the sidecar post over this one.

Anyway, last time we left off, we concluded that the cylinder didn't look too bad and that probably a bit of measuring and a hone-job would take care of the rest.

Just like a surgeon, it was about time to lay out the tools.

Tool #1 that was necessary was a 75-100mm micrometer for measuring the piston diameter and...

... setting up the internal micrometer to measure the actual bore and more importantly wear on the cylinder.

And the cylinder checks out more or less the same value from top to bottom and isn't bottled at all. Or in other words: Good to use again.

A little scrape with the hone to give those new rings something to bite into...

... and the diameter only changed 1/100th mm.

Next time there's a bit of cleaning and a new set of piston rings waiting.

Wednesday, 30 August 2017

August, 30th is registration day for the XS Triple Sidecar. And even though the old girl had come a long way there was still LOTS to do. Firstly as the preemptive inspective brought up, I had to build a steering damper. As much as a standard motorcycle steering damper would work they are rather costly and as I have a sidecar strut to affix it to, there's easier ways in getting the job done with a car-steering damper. The one used on here is for a Mercedes W124 and is a whopping 30 Euros.

Doesn't look like much, but was the better part of a day's work...

For some bizarre reason the brake pads were completely oily, greasy and mucky, even though the forks are nicely dry and leak free, so I rummaged in my parts bins and found this set of old sintered Dunlopad pads, which probably came out of my very first TR1.

Another thing that had to be tackled: The stock speedo wasn't working (and when I took it out, it became obvious that the old XS triple must have landed on its at least once and proper hard), so it was replaced by one kindly donated by a friend. (I still have to get in there once more after registration to replace all the lightbulbs with LEDs, but I am not gonna chance it before the registration!)

Another thing that had to be tackled was to enumerate various relevant parts, e.g. the sidecar frame needed a VIN. (If you ever wondered, where the infamous Dnepr Sidecar number 001 went, here it is! 😉)

And here you have it, technically two days of work and you see: not much has changed.

Btw.: When this post comes out, the inspection will have taken place at 10am (CET) the very same day.(And the old girl has passed with flying colours...)